Pulphead: Essays (42 page)

It became unsettling, though, when we started to watch the show. The hours of Hilton boredom brought on epic jags of cable flipping (oh, sad and too-hard colorful rubber buttons of hotel cable remotes). In the dark we’d look for the house to come on. We competed like in charades to say “There it is!” first. (Not as a formal competition but spontaneously.)

We formed memories of our house that weren’t memories; we’d experienced them solely through television. We hadn’t been there for them, yet they’d occurred while we lived there. It felt something like what I imagine amnesiacs feel when they are shown pictures from their unremembered lives. You thought, How could I not remember this, how can I not have known that this happened? Coming back home after a big shoot, and finding everything just as you’d left it, despite your certain knowledge that dramatic and often violent things had occurred there while you were gone, it kept bringing to mind a Steven Wright joke, from one of his comedy specials in the eighties. “Thieves broke into my house,” he said. “They took all my things and replaced them with exact replicas.”

Once we’d boarded the Hilton gravy train, the Greg Perimeter vanished like a knocked-out laser security grid at a museum. Breached by the wallpaper, it had suffered other small incursions during the early shoots—lights in the upstairs windows, for instance, to boost the artificial sunlight during a night shoot/day scene, a truly disorienting scene, the last we stayed home for, when they made it afternoon in the front yard. Now they were actually setting scenes in other rooms. Peyton and Lucas (Chad Michael Murray’s character, the Chachi to Peyton’s Joanie) baked cookies in the kitchen. They got into a food fight and started slinging dough at each other. All over our kitchen, dough balls hitting the wall. Splat, in the cracks, on the cupboards, sailing out into the hallway. Surely this was grounds for a lucrative contract readjustment. I checked the terms— Arrgh! I’d signed over the whole property! “Equal to the amount of the mortgage,” said the guy on my shoulder.

And besides, when we got home, everything was spotless. Couldn’t find a fleck of dough anywhere. Couldn’t find a chocolate chip (wish I had—it might be worth something on eBay). The only way the scene had affected us, in a strict material sense, was that we got our kitchen professionally cleaned for free. We’d faced harder challenges.

That’s when Psycho Derek appeared.

*   *   *

Much later, when we were no longer on friendly terms with
One Tree
, I caught myself wondering if Psycho Derek had not perhaps been created purely as an instrument for abusing our house, to make sure we never forgot the name Peyton Sawyer. Who was he? Who was Psycho Derek?

In another country, in another world, “Ian Banks” is a young blond Scottish writer. He has a pretty wife, and one night they’re out driving. He’s drunk and messing with the wheel. Crash, she dies. In his guilt and grief, he goes on the Internet and starts looking for girls who look like his wife. Guess what, his wife looked just like Peyton. He does some research. He learns that Peyton has a biological brother, separated at birth, name: Derek. Lightbulb—he’ll impersonate the brother. From behind that mask he worms his way into her world. But Peyton figures out he’s a violent obsessive. She cuts him off. That’s when he starts to attack. Our house.

He tied up Peyton and her best friend, Brooke, in the basement, as a prelude to raping them (
One Tree
was getting dark, that’s where its campiness lost me, with the darkness—I don’t see how you get to be teeny-dumb and do psychotic teen rape fantasies, but as I say, the irony of the genre has evolved, found new crevices). In one episode Psycho Derek was pushed down our staircase, violently grabbing at the antique banister to save himself as he fell. In another he got thrown through our bedroom window onto a safety bag on the front lawn. Our house had become the stunt house (they don’t care, they’re at the Hilton, they need the money!).

The crew couldn’t clean up after this stuff as easily. Everything was not the same when we got home. The yard was full of shattered safety glass. The handrail on the stairs was a few centimeters more rickety, thanks to Psycho Derek’s heavy grasping (when we watched it on TV we realized that the stunt guy had actually fallen backward onto the rail, with all his weight). Not to mention that in our minds the basement was now permanently a onetime BDSM sex dungeon, and not a mutual-consent swinger dungeon, either. Psycho Derek had created some seriously bad visual associations in the house, ones our daughter might not enjoy discovering come her own teen years—the basement bondage pre-rape had taken place on Peyton’s prom night. (Prom was hard on our house: Peyton’s friend, Brooke, mad at Peyton for something, had egged it on the day of the prom; deranged Brooke fans later re-created this incident in “reality,” hitting our house with eggs in the very same spots; at least we assumed that’s who did it. Could have been vandals.)

I can’t blame Derek for everything. And I should take this opportunity to thank the real Derek, Peyton’s true half brother, who turned out to be black, and showed up just in time, wearing a varsity jacket, to save her from Psycho Derek, and our home from any more trauma. No, Psycho Derek had been neutralized by the time we ended the contract.

What did happen? I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that it was a sort of caveman thing. Instincts that had lain dormant in my genome for generations awoke. Who were these strangers in my rock shelter? Why were they walking in and out without knocking or saying goodbye, why did they keep referring to it as “Peyton’s House”? This is my house. The more the story line expanded through the rooms, the worse the feeling became. And of course the crew guys, who’d now been coming to the house for several years—who knew it in some ways better than we did—couldn’t help making themselves more comfortable in it over time, sneaking in for more bathroom breaks. On one shoot, I remember, I’d been confused about where they needed to set up, and as a result neglected to clean the bedroom. Later a crew guy—the same one who’d told me about
Blue Velvet
—said, “I’m not used to picking up other people’s underwear.” I felt like saying, Then don’t go into their bedrooms at nine o’clock in the morning! Except he was paying to be in my bedroom.

Isn’t there another profession where people pay to be in your bedroom?

One day, we were at the Hilton, and I realized I’d forgotten something. I drove back to the house in the middle of a shoot. On my way out, having found what I needed, I ran into one of the crew. He had dinner plates in his hands. I knew those plates—they were plates we’d been given when we got married.

He got nervous, obviously aware that he’d crossed some line. He told me that the stars, in their dining van, had asked for real plates. These were the first he’d seen. In that awkward moment on the brick path there, something came into my head that my across-the-street neighbor, Arnie, kept saying to me, rather passive-aggressively I thought, when I would pass him on the sidewalk. Inevitably remarking on the
One Tree Hill
stuff, he’d say, “The way my wife and I feel is, we don’t have much, but it’s ours.”

By then I was fairly certain that all the neighbors hated us. I’m sure that when we moved in, they were praying we wouldn’t resume the previous owners’ contract with the show, that the nightmare would end. These shoots couldn’t help disrupting the whole psychogeography of the block. To have to be waved through by cops into your own neighborhood, how obnoxious! The lights, the noise (the crew were always scrupulously hushed outside, but when you have that many people, there’s a hive hum). I felt how much I’d hate it, if I were one of them. And why our house, anyway? There was just some bad anthropological juju going on in our little barrio. And that’s not good. You don’t want that. When Armageddon comes and the village is reset to a primitive state, your clan will be shunned and denied resources.

When a disagreement about money came up—we thought we were owed for an extra day—my subconscious seized on it as an excuse (though I didn’t really need one, they were unpleasant about the money, which seemed weird, given we’d never been complainers). Finally one day we told them they couldn’t film there anymore. It was all too big a pain in the ass. I had a suspicion they were thinking about the attic. I’ve never had that confirmed, but the attic is neat-looking, and it would have been the next logical step. Psycho Derek isn’t dead, he’s in the attic, boring peepholes. Our daughter was getting older, old enough to start wondering why we regularly moved out of the house and then right back in again, and who was living there in the meantime? If my brain couldn’t handle the metaphysical implications of it all, what chance did she have? A producer called and offered us a lot more money at one point—so Peyton could say goodbye—but it had become a principle thing by then, and it felt good to say no, to reclaim the cave. And so, for primarily petty and neurotic reasons, I made a decision that negatively impacted our financial future. It’s called being a good father.

I remember when they came to get Peyton’s furniture. Because she’d moved in at the same time as us, her things and ours had mingled at the edges. My wife was at work, and with some pieces, I didn’t know whose they were. The guy who was in charge that day held up a vase that had been on the table. “I honestly don’t know if that’s ours or hers,” I said. I suspected it was hers, but had always liked it. “You know what,” the guy said, “let’s just say it’s yours.”

They sent painters in, which I thought was classy. Many of the walls had been scuffed by equipment and gaffer’s tape and whatnot. My wife gave them a bunch of bold colors, colors we’d never tended to before. The place looks totally different. It’s ours again, or rather for the first time. We burned a sage stick. Both literally and metaphorically.

Our only worry was that maybe we’d caused trouble for Hilarie somehow, affected the plotline in some way that made Peyton less essential to the cast, but when we ran into her some weeks later and voiced this concern, she was characteristically ultramature about it, and said, “You know, I think you really helped her grow up.” Her being Peyton. The producers had decided to zip forward the story line four years—just skip college, go straight from right after high-school graduation to right after college graduation, with the characters all back home, in order to avoid the dorm-room doldrums that have brought down other teen shows, like
Felicity
. Now Peyton lived downtown. She managed bands. “She doesn’t live in her parents’ house anymore,” Hilarie said. “She has her own apartment. I think it’s about time.”

*   *   *

A year passed. We were at the airport in London—my wife had a conference there. Standing in the ticket line, we started talking about the show—probably we’d seen an old episode in one of the hotels we’d stayed at in Scotland—and we were having a what-an-experience type of conversation. At one point, the woman in front of us turned around. Business suit, dark bun. She leaned forward, and in an unplaceable European accent, said, “You have a lovely home.” Not in a creepy way. She said it about as nicely as you could say something like that. “Are you a fan of the show?” my wife asked. “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “I always watch it.” She knew exactly what Petyon’s house looked like. She described it for us. The white railing, the hallway.

By then we’d grown inured to fans coming by, frequently knocking on the door. They acted more passionate in the early days, or at least more brazen. They wanted pictures of themselves, of them with you, of you and the house, them and the house, one at a time. They were 90 percent female, teens and early twenties, but lots of their moms came with them. One of the few males, a tall skinny stonery guy, gave me half of a dollar bill, and asked me to hide it inside something on the set. I put it inside a little African-looking wooden bowl that we and Peyton kept by the front door. The bowl had a lid. He thanked us profusely and said that now he could sit at home with his girlfriend, who loved Peyton, and they’d know the other half of the dollar bill was in her house. When they came for Peyton’s stuff, it was still in there; I checked.

Nobody was ever scary or rude. One time we did get these Belgian girls. They were perhaps unwholesomely fixated on the show. Six of them showed up, with a Lebanese taxi-van driver who’d brought them straight from the airport, four minutes away. He’d evidently picked them up outside baggage claim and, hearing their talk of
One Tree Hill
, offered to give them a tour of locations. Now here they were. The driver stood behind them the whole time, as if presenting them to us for consideration. We gave them a couple of souvenirs from the show, a script from an old episode that had been lying around, something else I don’t remember. At these modest acts of kindness they broke down into tears, which caused my wife to go and get more things to give them, which made them cry harder. I can see them standing in the hallway, these beautiful girls, crying and laughing. They gave us a jar of excellent honey from their country, and an Eiffel Tower key chain that my daughter loved and we still use. Bless you, girls, wherever you are. Watching
One Tree
, probably.

The farthest away that anyone ever came from—another mother-daughter team—was Thailand. “Peyton House?” Mostly Ohio, Florida, places like that.

Just this week, we had two from South Carolina knock at the door. My daughter and I met them on the porch. If I had to guess, I’d say they were about to embark on their senior year of high school. You could tell they were good friends, because they never said a word to each other. They stared at us, and past us into the house.